Super-massive black holes aren’t just fodder for catchy electro-rock tunes. Based off recent findings out of UC Berkeley and the UK, they’re also capable of wreaking insane havoc on us all — case in point being the one that “swallowed and ripped apart a wandering star.”

The research was sparked in response to an explosion of gamma rays that NASA first noticed in March of this year. Though such a blast is not a totally uncommon occurrence, the one in question was apparently unusual in both duration and intensity, leading to the studies that pinpointed the source as a black hole 3.8 billion light-years away.